I know there are a thousand posts about this but here is my story. I have an arduino uno. I cannot upload to it any more. The last sketch uploaded was blink and it is still working. When I hit reset led 13 blinks 3 times and it goes back into blink. When I connect the board to the PC (Win7 64) the pc adds a com port and it looks fine from the OS side. There is 3.3 and 5v coming out of the board. The TX and RX never go on. I tried a "loopback" test no response from the board. I get the following error from the program software 1.0.3 avrdude.exe: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00 Did I kill the board? I was playing with 12V through an npn. It seems I may have killed the communications. Is there any way to bypass this with another connection? RS232?

Sorry you are dealing with a complete new comer to the Arduino world. It seems nothing on the board is warm. The atmega I'm guessing you are referring to the large removable chip marked atmega328p-pu (and again a complete rookie) is not warm. I have tried in the Arduino software to "Burn Bootloader" I get the following error avrdude.exe: usbdev_open(): did not find any USB device "usb" The port and board are correctly selected and the OS is recognizing the board ok. Is this what I should be doing to flash the bootloader again? What about the baud rate will that have any effect on the board? Before uploading blink I sent a script that had the following in it Serial.begin(57600);. Can that have changed anything that made it not work? I'm lost don't want to have to buy another one if this is fixable. Thanks for your help in advance.

Well, in that case, if you want to quickly start again, an option is to buy that chip (atmega328) with a bootloader and replace it. Other option is just to google: http://arduino.cc/en/Hacking/Bootloader for example is a good place to start

It's always good to have a few extra 328P bootloader chips sitting in the box for timeslike this. At least, since they're not surface-mount, you can swap them easily. However,since the loopback test does not work, sounds more likely the smt USB chip is toast, so you might buy another UNO. Also, good to have a couple of these spare.